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- Favourite book character; can’t be a movie.<\/strong> Well, I don’t have one of these, so I just chose the lead character from the most recent book I finished, Now Is the Hour,<\/em> by Tom Spanbauer. Chuck Palahniuk says Spanbauer is the man who taught him how to write, so I figured it was worth a try. I liked it and thought it had real life to it, though the territory (midwest US farm boy comes of age) is extremely well-trod. <\/li>\n
- Favourite word.<\/strong> Enantiodromia<\/em> refers to the tendency for things to find a balance. Jung used the word (as I understand it) to describe how suppressed desires will come out more even strongly in other, possibly inappropriate areas of life. (cf: homo-hating Republicans who get caught in public restrooms with male prostitutes.)<\/li>\n
- Favourite animated character.<\/strong> I don’t have one now, but when I was a kid I yearned to be<\/em> Mickey Mouse, and pretended with a Method-actor intensity that I was him. Now, though, I think the Disney corporation is a vile peddler of imagination-ruining nonsense. (Girls, there are only about three available princess jobs in the world, and princesses tend to become very, very unhappy. Or dead.)<\/li>\n
- Favourite TV show.<\/strong> Craig and I enjoyed a show this year called “Getting On” by UK comedian Jo Brand. It was a clever, dry-as-gin, yet engaging look inside the crushing and ridiculous bureaucracy of the National Health Service. I thought it might be no fun for Craig to watch on TV more of what he has to deal with every day, but there’s a lot of cathartic joy in seeing someone articulate””with humour and insight””exactly what your situation is like, and that’s exactly what this show did.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
By contrast to Getting On<\/em> is the TV I’ve been seeing here in Canada: the Canadian news strikes me as extremely good, but the adverts are just shockinglybad. The voice-over actors are all doing what sounds””to my UK-conditioned ears””like a berserk level of over-emoting up and down the scale from the women, and way, way<\/em> too much of that gravelly fake-manlymanly extreeeeeeme voice from the men.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Then there are all the pharmaceutical and “Rah! Rah! Support the troops!” ads from the States. Presumably there’s a target-marketed type of individual on the other end who responds to these messages. The thought frightens me.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The Canadian ads go for a more folksy, funny, “Aren’t we quirky?” angle, but they still ring a really fake note to my ear.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s New Year’s Eve-day and the family have no plans, so we’re all doing our own thing. I decided to doodle, picking up the 30-Day Drawing Challenge (though Lord knows how long ago I started it). Here’s what I came up with: Favourite book character; can’t be a movie. Well, I don’t have one of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15373"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15373\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
- Favourite word.<\/strong> Enantiodromia<\/em> refers to the tendency for things to find a balance. Jung used the word (as I understand it) to describe how suppressed desires will come out more even strongly in other, possibly inappropriate areas of life. (cf: homo-hating Republicans who get caught in public restrooms with male prostitutes.)<\/li>\n